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Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Family History Hints, Part 11

I grew up in a town of 35,000 people. I do believe I was the only person named Jean Marie Wilcox. But I have an ancestor, Johann Adam Hollaender, who was one of three with the same name, alive at the same time (many others with that name were alive before and after his time as a resident) in his small village of Edesheim, Germany (pop. 200 . . . then, the 1800s, and now . . . or at least very close to the same population today). In "the old days" - the days that we researched for much of Genealogy Roadshow - names were similar or identical among peers in the same location. And we got to figure out who was who. I explained the phenomenon to the staff:

You mean there can be two people with the same name and
approximate age in the same town?

Oh, yes! It is quite common to find a name being repeated
over and over. Often these people are related in some way, but that connection
may go back quite a number of generations; this has confounded genealogists
since they started recording family trees. Part of this is due to naming
patterns and following traditions such as:

First son -
named for paternal grandfather

Second son
- named for maternal grandfather

Third son -
named for father

Fourth son
- named for father’s oldest brother

OK, so let’s take a patriarch: John William Jones

His oldest
son is: Patrick Steven Jones (after his
father’s father)

Next oldest
son is: Joseph Orin Jones (after his
mother’s father)

Next oldest
son is: John William Jones, Jr. (after
his father)

Nest oldest
son is: Peter Andrew Jones (after his
paternal uncle)

Patrick has 4 sons as follows:

John
William Jones, II (named for paternal grandfather)

Artimus
Christian Jones (mother’s father’s given names)

Patrick
Steven Jones, Jr. (named for father)

Joseph Orin
Jones (named for father’s brother)

Joseph Orin Jones has 4 sons as follows:

John
William Jones, II (named for paternal grandfather)

Adam Paul
Jones (named for maternal grandfather)

Joseph Orin
Jones, Jr. (named for father)

Patrick
Steven Jones, II (named for father’s brother)

John William Jones, Jr. has 4 sons as follows:

John
William Jones, II (named for paternal grandfather)

Lewis
Carter Jones (named for maternal grandfather)

John
William Jones, III (named for father)

Patrick
Steven Jones, II (named for father’s brother)

Peter Andrew Jones has 4 sons as follows:

John
William Jones, II (named for paternal grandfather)

Christopher
Alexander Jones (named for maternal grandfather)

Peter
Andrew Jones, Jr. (named for father)

Patrick
Steven Jones, II (named for father’s brother)

If everyone stays in the same neighborhood, we now have four
cousins, all called John William Jones, II. Around family and the neighborhood,
the patriarch may be called “John the elder” while the others are identified as
John, Jr. (even though that isn’t his legal title), Willie-boy, Bill, and
Johnny. Sometimes these calling names appear on documents; sometimes they use
their legal names when signing or completing documents. How do we know which
John William Jones, II is the right one?

To complicate matters, we also have five Patrick Steven
Joneses - one the eldest (who might be called Patrick Senior), his son (who
might use Patrick Junior), and then the three cousins, Pat the butcher, Steven,
and P.S. Same problem with legal documents.

Does this happen often? Over and over. And frequently it is
the cause for family trees to get all tangled with grafted branches and
misplaced limbs. The genealogist has to use extra caution when trying to
decipher these issues.

It is also common that, if a child dies, the next child will
be given the previous one’s name (if they are of the same sex). So if, in our
example above, John William Jones’s son Patrick dies before the next son is
born, that child will most likely get the name Patrick. This is also true for
female children.

Another not uncommon practice is, when a man loses his wife
and then remarries (almost a necessity if he now has small children to care
for), the first girl child born to his new wife will be named, in reverent
memory, after the previous wife.

Now you see why there are times we have to search and then
re-search to make sure we are following the right trees and why people will see
the same name over and over and believe they are related when, indeed, the person may be a distant cousin
or, possibly, not related at all.

I am a native of Illinois and grew up in Wilmette, a northern suburb of Chicago. I have one sibling, an older brother.
After dropping out of college, I moved to California in 1973 with my first husband. I married my present husband, Butch, in 1977 and got 4 children in the deal. They have gone on to make me a grandmother 24 times over and a great-grandmother of 16 with three more due in 2016.
Three years after I married Butch I returned to school. I got my bachelors and masters degrees in speech communication and was a professor in that field for 13 years. I retired in 2001 to return to school and get my doctorate in folklore. Now I meld my two interests - folklore and genealogy - and add my teaching background, resulting in my current profession: speaker/entertainer of genealogically-related topics. I play a number of folk instruments, but my preference is guitar, which I have been playing since 1963. I am a Board Certified genealogist and more information on all this, as well as direct contact info, is on my Circlemending website.

2 comments:

That was very interesting and helpful too! I am the first born to my parents and I am named for my paternal grandfather. I now have a big project to try and determine the rest of my tree. I know one generation back in the mid 1800's named all four of his sons after presidents and his brother named all his sons after famous Baptist preachers of the time. Interesting indeed.